Since late last year, Amnesia of Razorfish in Sydney have been the lucky owners of only the few Microsoft Surface computers in Australia and they’ve been busy. One of the latest demos they’ve developed is a business card scanning application that recognizes special markings on the cards and fetches the person’s social networking feeds.
Having to provide a $12k Surface computer to every recipient of your business cards is probably not the most economically sound solution to make your business cards stand out, but as for the cool geek factor, the only thing better would be a business card that’s printed on a real CPU chip or graphics card one can then plug into the PC. Suddenly AMD, Intel and NVIDIA employees would become very popular.
An interesting alternative use for this application might be another type of cards, game cards which come alive with animated characters and an interactive gameboard that takes games like miniature wargames or even monopoly to the next generation.
Speaking of which, some developers at the (apparently Surface-aplenty) parent company Razorfish also developed this cool physical interactive game for the Surface called “Table Toss”. I should point out the kid giggling is not part of the game.
hope Surface is out for home use as it is promised by 2011…. and the price comes down too 🙂
I believe Microsoft Surface is the way forward for computing interactively….
Haha yeah, I thought the table made the laughing sound effect when you hit the bullseye. Then I saw that it’s just the game.
This is cooler: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/cool-video-iphone-and-microsoft-surface-mashup.ars
Can the surface read the microsoft barcodes or does it not do color/shading well?
Technologically, it seems a bit lame… The only thing it really does is read the dot pattern, and that’s been a standard Surface feature since day one.
Also: “Here’s my card. If you happen to own a $12,000 Surface machine, and you also happen to have this third party card reading application installed on it, you can put my card on it and you can see who my facebook friends are.”
“Yeah.. I think I’ll just write down your email address just in case.”
“Oh yeah, the application also has to be running, first. But you also get a flickr feed of my holiday snaps!”
@Fred, “application also has to be running”… it wouldn’t be to much of stretch to imagine Surface providing a list of applications that are applicable to the tag type. And if you only have one application for the tag type it automatically runs it. Works for me.
@RC, I’m also wondering the same thing. It would boost Microsoft Tag appeal if it was known to work with Surface.
Sorta off topic, but I was thinking MS should make a version of the Surface hardware that can be built into a countertop. I’m thinking like the counter at hotel reception or a retailer. It would be built in, so it would have the screen, but not the rest of the cabinet.
That’s cool, where I work (Microsoft SVC) there’s a Surface Table, but it only has the basic set of apps.
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